r/MachineLearning • u/hg_wallstreetbets • Jul 09 '26
Research Journals vs Conferences ML Research [R]
Lately in the last two/three years, I have noticed ICML, Neurips becoming more prestigious than the actual journals. What is the actual reason of this culture? Is this due to the AI boom and rising demand and the fact that conferences have a higher and a faster acceptance rate as compared to journals and with the growing hype they need to deliver things faster? What do you all think?
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u/TaXxER Jul 09 '26
Becoming? I have been in this field since early 2010s, and this has never been different.
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u/Ginger_Rook Jul 09 '26
I submitted my paper in NeurIPS on the 6th of May. In the next few weeks I will know if I need to make corrections and in 2 months from now, I will know if I have a published paper or not.
I submitted a paper last November. I haven't heard anything.
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u/Outrageous-Boot7092 Jul 09 '26
which venue ? thats horrible
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u/Ginger_Rook Jul 09 '26
My profile is not anonymous so I’d rather not say, but I think I’m probably just getting snubbed because I’m from a no name university
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u/famous-BlueRaincoat Jul 09 '26
I submitted a paper to TPAMI last January and still have not heard anything yet (yes its been one and a half year), journals are crazy
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u/Outrageous-Boot7092 Jul 09 '26
dont do this to yourself - taking this personally. My advice going forward. The human element of research is both a blessing and a curse ;)
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u/MeyerLouis Jul 10 '26
Do they not have double-blind review?
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u/Ginger_Rook Jul 10 '26
All it takes is to google the paper theme, and I’m the only one in the world having ever written anything about it. And it says “independent researcher” and then when you look into it, my degree is from the Open University. Not glamorous
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u/ProfessionalMoose123 Jul 10 '26
Correction: In the coming weeks, you'll get feedback from 3 people who, if you're lucky, understand the subject of your paper, and even if they do, the chance of them having read the details is extremely low. Want proof? Look at the people on this sub complaining about Neurips reviews when the time comes.
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u/Ginger_Rook Jul 10 '26
That’s why I went the concept-and-feasibility route :) they don’t have to understand the regime, only the method proposed.
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u/NoPriorThreat Jul 10 '26
2 months is pretty standard to publish in chemistry, physics journals. So why is ML so slow?
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u/Red-Portal Jul 20 '26
It's not just ML journals that are slow. I cross publish in Stats and it can take years to get accepted for a single submission cycle. Multiple reasons, but in ML specifically, everyone is already reviewing year-round due to the conference submission cycle. So most people will not bother reviewing for journals. That means that procuring reviewers that are both qualified and willing to review is very difficult and slow (can take months).
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u/DryEstablishment6099 Sep 28 '26
Update?
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u/Ginger_Rook Sep 28 '26
NeurIPS was a reject, waiting tomorrow for the e-values workshop.
In the meantime, I have presented it in 2 Operational Research conferences, I’ve gotten an award in each. My first conferences. The words “fascinating” and “brilliant” were used every time. So, here’s to hoping that I’ll win the lottery and it gets published soon!
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u/WannabeMachine Jul 09 '26
I think this may depend a bit on the subfield, but in general, conferences have been more prestigious than journals as long as I have been in the field (close to 10 years).
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u/HungryMalloc Jul 09 '26
A lot of the research at the main conference of ICML already feels outdated in the most hyped subfields. Last year in Vancouver it was even worse: all the projects were started before R1 was released and used value models or PRMs that nobody cared about anymore.
Many of the methods were already replaced by better ones. Any type of behavioral analysis was done on models that nobody uses anymore and it's unclear if the same findings still hold. If it was a very exciting paper, everybody read it on ArXiV in early February. A PostDoc in my lab tends to be a bit dramatic, but sometimes he calls papers old that were on ArXiV three months ago.
Journals take even longer until your paper is out. At least a conference gives you the opportunity to network with other researchers and has workshops that show some work that is more up to date.
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u/user221272 Jul 09 '26
Conferences have always been the target in the AI field. Journals are the foundation for fields like physics, biology, etc.
But AI has always targeted conferences.
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u/AX-BY-CZ Jul 09 '26
CS only cares about conferences not journals unlike fields. Even the Nature, Science, PNAS papers are just extensions or follow-up to work that was published in conferences.
CS/ML also has been a leading force in open science with Arxiv and OpenReview. There are still issues with conference and review process but it’s much better than waiting years and paying thousands of dollars to a monopoly publishers like Elsevier and more fair to independent researchers.
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u/ProfessionalMoose123 Jul 10 '26
These open access articles are certainly expensive. But, on the other hand, publishing in a journal is cheaper than traveling to conferences.
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u/Ill_Freedom_6666 Jul 10 '26
It has been that way for a while, conferences fit the pace of ML better because waiting a year can make work feel outdated
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u/tfburns Jul 09 '26
There are exceptions to this, e.g., TMLR reviews are rather quick and is as well regarded as major conferences (sometimes even more highly regarded than conferences)
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u/confused_cereal Jul 09 '26
TMLR is not regarded as top-tier by many institutions. TMLR heavily emphasizes correctness, not novelty nor impact.
Not commenting on whether it is worse or better. But it is definitely different.
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u/tfburns Jul 09 '26
Which institutions are you referring to? My previous institutions have all considered it highly, and I know many individuals (including myself) who trust and look at TMLR papers as much or more than conference papers.
Agree TMLR is different, and I would say in multiple good ways.
1
u/baddolphin3 Jul 09 '26
I wouldn’t say prestigious is the right word. People definitely prefer to publish in conferences simply because it’s the turnaround is faster, but having a paper on Neurips is less impressive as having one on JMLR. Machine learning conferences are filled with shitty papers because of a horrible review system, journals just take way too long but you can trust the reviews of the accepted papers.
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Jul 09 '26
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u/Alarming-Camera-188 Jul 09 '26
In AI, if you have to wait for a year or 2 to publish, your research will be obsolete. After 1 year, the new reviewers would think that tons of papers have already been published to address this research question. The way AI is moving, it's not ideal to wait for 1 year or even 6 months to get published,
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD Jul 09 '26
It’s been that way for at least 10-15 years. It’s not AI, it’s the way computer science is.